


mosquitos

by audries



Category: Cheers (TV)
Genre: F/M, late stage quarantine is going um interesting......., thanks for asking!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-07
Updated: 2020-07-07
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:00:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,274
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25130527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audries/pseuds/audries
Summary: “Besides, most species of female spiders will eat the male post-coitus,” she says, "and we’ve already established that I’m not trying to kill you.”Sam kicks his heels together on the floor. “At least they wait till after.”
Relationships: Diane Chambers/Sam Malone
Comments: 2
Kudos: 16





	mosquitos

**Author's Note:**

> this was a collab between me & a late quarantine hippie speedball

post _-hey, everybody, Sam can't say he loves me!_

_-_

Sam on the floor beside the couch while she sits very straight up against the cushions. She’s aware she’s probably enjoying this a little too much, coaching him like Higgins out of _Pygmalion_ , her knee pressed into his shoulder. He’d gotten through nearly every syllable that last time but had leveled a hundred yard stare straight ahead while he was at it. Like he was looking hard through a telescope at some stranded version of her, standing on far away ground.

She says, “I’m sorry, are you speaking to me or to the wall of your office?”

Sam makes a noise like a breaking neck, but slower. “Woman,” he says, “you are trying to kill me.”

They’d briefly gotten into it earlier over tongue twisters—who could say what faster, first, with the most finesse—as the poker game broke up outside. She’d won, smug, with “imagine an imaginary menagerie,” because not for nothing was she Massachusetts’ junior oratory champion three years running, but really she’d bludgeoned the whole endeavor into unconsciousness when Sam had finally gotten wise to the lurking entendre. _You know, sweetheart, if you want to see a_ real _tongue twister_ —she‘d held up her hand like please, spare me, and he’d sat down hard on the floor by her feet, looking aloof and annoyed. 

And, the whole time, he’d never once asked her to say it.

“Man,” she replies, low. “I am doing no such thing.” Then in her own voice again: “ _Sam_. I’m never trying to _kill_ you.”

As if to prove it, she creeps her hand down from her lap into the space at the open white collar of his shirt, brushing the backs of her fingers against where the base of his neck meets the top of his long spine. 

“See? No noose, no knife. I couldn’t hurt a fly, and the pair of you are equally obnoxious. But you’re,” she pauses, pressing her knuckles flat against him. What is he that she doesn’t try to wring his neck when she should? She frowns, plucking around for an arbitrary word like an unpracticed musician for a chord. She won’t hit the right one. That he renders her inarticulate, what with the way he makes absolutely no sense at all, is perhaps the thing she hates most about him, more even than the actual lack of sense.

“More difficult to debilitate,” she finishes.

Sam snorts. “Gee thanks, babe. Good to know where I rank with you and bugs.” But he leans back into her touch.

“Above mosquitos,” she offers.

Sometimes, honestly, she does fantasize about slapping at him. The sting and itch and bite of Sam are the same as any swamp dweller— _gets under my skin_ , she has said of him from the beginning, over the phone to her college roommate; her bartender, who bugged the hell out of her—but so is the summer hesitation. She knows when she pulls back her hand, satisfied, the smear of blood will still be mostly her own.

“But below spiders, right?” Prodding from the floor, Sam curls the question up into a sneer. Like he would revel in the degradation. Like, if she insists on laying him so low, he’ll sink easy to meet her at the bottom. Even as he preens into her hand.

She doesn’t bite. Unfortunately, both the posturing and the preening make her feel fond to point of nausea. A week since she’d seen him—it felt like a long time. “ _Well_ above spiders.”

One of the things she knows about Sam, of whom she knows so strangely little, practically speaking, is that he hates spiders—had gone squeamish in her bathroom one yellow morning a month ago, wary of her old clawfoot tub, begging through toothpaste for her to please, please, Diane, honey, if you never do anything else for me, please do not to say anything to the guys about this. Especially Carla.

She hadn’t, but mostly because she liked that she knew it of him, and they didn’t.

“Besides, most species of female spiders will eat the male post-coitus,” she says, "and we’ve already established that I’m not trying to kill you.”

Sam kicks his heels together on the floor. “At least they wait till after.”

She bats at the back of his head, pulling out of reach when he twists a little to lunge for her wrist. Probably, she thinks, as she holds herself away, waiting for him to turn back to contemplation of desert island Diane, he thinks he can get her to speak his language for the next hour or so, distract her into a different kind of linguistics exercise just so he doesn’t have to look at her and say again what he still hasn’t said yet. It’s thoroughly annoying that she’s amenable, or would have been if he’d succeeded in catching her hand. A week is a long time.

Even so: he is terrible. The long week hadn’t made him kinder or smarter or better. It hadn't made him any different at all, really, and she had known it wouldn’t, and she had missed him.

Flipping her hand, she brings her fingers again to the back of his neck, drawing her nails together under his collar, scratching gently so he shivers, then harder, so he winces and sits forward.

“Occasionally,” she admits, “I‘m trying to maim you a little.”

He says, “ _Ow_ , Diane,” but she only eases up a fraction, and he lets it go, shifts his shoulders forward, stays just-barely tense. An athlete’s posture. Always ready, even loose and uncareful at the end of the game, for the shock of the bucket of ice. “A little maiming s’alright,” he mumbles. The skin of his neck is hot under her fingertips like under the red glare of sun or shame.

Diane can’t really picture the specifics of a ball game gone deep into the hollow of a bottomless ninth inning—who stands where, who’s home, who’s safe and who isn’t—but she can imagine Sam called up fast to pitch like an emergency service. Mayday, all long limbs and a slice of clean, lazy smile. Everyone tilted forward with eyes wide to see if he’s there to save the day or blow it, looking down from stadium seats for something a little more decisive than the old college try. And she remembers Sam’s bent elbow up on the bar, a flat bottle cap like a dime; she thinks there must have been plenty of days when he wore that clean, lazy smile over something uglier and more sea-sick than self-confidence. There must have been plenty of days when Mayday, who they called in to handle someone else’s crisis, blew the game away like smoke and thin paper under all those hard stares.

His hot neck under her fingers. It is hard to picture him drinking, but it isn’t hard enough. When she’d woken up on her couch last Friday, it had been to three Advil and a sweating glass of water and no note on her coffee table, and when she’d called him, fuzzy and whining, he’d said _aw, honey, I bet you’re hurting this morning_ and hadn’t laughed. She softens her touch.

Sam. He does try.

“Occasionally,” she repeats, quieter. “But not now.”

He drops like a stone into the lighter touch, ice endured, chin to chest. Looking at the back of his prone, stupid head, that inarticulate and tender thing creeps up her throat again. Its slow ascent makes her feel cheated and childish, and very alone.

She slumps over hard to one side, takes her hand off him. Sam, who had said if you want to see a real tongue twister instead of I love you.

“ _You’re_ trying to kill _me_ ,” she accuses, petulant. She puts her hand up to her forehead as if in faint.

Sam laughs. The bastard. He turns over so his chin rests on her knees, head in her lap, blinking up at her like something dumb and sweet and more dangerous than a dog. For a moment, she has no idea what she could possibly say to him that he would understand. It leaves her feeling caught out, silly and desperately ashamed in a way she doesn’t appreciate in the slightest. Like being called on in class when she hadn't been raising her hand. Don't look at me, I don't know the answer. But then he tilts his head as if seeing he close for the first time all night, and on her next breath out she decides, actually, the speechlessness of the two of them has always been the best part.

To ruin it, Sam says, “So, spider girl, can I drive you home?”

Ugh. She musses a hand heavy in his hair because she thinks it will annoy him. But when he grabs her wrist away it is gentle, the pressing of his mouth against the back of her hand without pretense. Still, to be mean, because he could say Which wristwatches are Swiss wristwatches? but not the other thing, she says, “My car’s here. I drove.”

“Oh.”

She's embarrassed immediately, even though it’s true. Her own pettiness burns her up in a playground kind of way. Twisting your palms on someone else’s wrists to leave the skin raw and burning. Except she'd never used to do that as a child. She'd looked down from on high at the kids who did; the same way she was always trying and failing to look at Sam. His neck warm under her hand.

He leans back a little, and she reaches out to keep her hand on his arm as he moves. “Hm,” he says. “It’s just that my chauffeur skills are getting rusty, is all.” He twists his wrists in front of him, to emphasize the potential strain, wiggles his fingers. She raises an eyebrow, smirks, and he grins at her, silly, but flushing, as if he’d meant it as a clumsy attempt at chivalry; let me drive you home, and now she’s laughing at him.

She is reminded of the reason she is not the _four-_ time Massachusetts’ junior oratory champ, of the year she’d slept badly the night before, forgotten her speech, gone pink and stammering on stage. Everyone’s eyes on her, the expectation in the room like smoke. Heaviness and heat and the crowd stinging away before her eyes. 

By way of apology, she says, “I left the windows down. And I think it might rain.”

She can drive to his place, she is on the verge of saying, or he can meet her at hers? But in the clumsiness of the chauffeur gesture, she’d recognized that he’d said what he’d meant to say, asked what he'd meant to ask of her. He’d said, Can I drive you home? And not: Yours or mine? And all through the stupid tongue twisters, and the quote she’d memorized out of an overdue Boston Library book, and the smug way she’d said “imaginary menagerie” like she’d won something, he had never asked her to _say_ it.

“It’s just that,” Sam is shrugging up to stand. He scuffs his shoe like a child. He looks down at her and smiles, uncertain, like he had after she’d said _okay, okay I won’t tell anyone about the spider._

He says, “A week is a long time.”

 _Probably_ , she’d eventually amended, because she couldn't give him anything too easy, and he'd burnt toast in her kitchen, _I probably won’t tell anyone._  
  
She blinks at him. She thinks: he said it! as if this is what she'd been trying to pull from him like teeth for the past hour. A week is a long time. And then: But does he mean it now like how she'd meant it earlier? Yesterday morning? Wednesday night when she was watching _Jeopardy_ and it was less satisfying because it hadn’t won out over _Bonanza_ and, also, she had gotten all the sports questions wrong?

Sam palms the back of his neck, flashes her that clean, lazy smile. 

Mayday, who they didn’t pay to try. 

“Alright,” she is saying suddenly, “Alright, yes. Take me home, Sam.” And she is vaguely aware, smiling at him, that this is what she has wanted to say since she came in here tonight, before or instead of the other things. This, instead of "imaginary menagerie."

She lets him put his hand on her waist and keep it there, grinning like the devil but uncharacteristically careful, almost chaste, then watches him fumble one-handed with the bar lights on the wall outside the office. "Just think," she says, "how easy this would be if you had eight legs."

"Please," he says, " _please_ , shut up." But when he kisses her he accidentally turns on the hallway overheads and the light over the pool table, so she races him down the hall to the other dimmer to see who can’t get it right first.

Flipping the switch to kill the back room's bulb in its stained glass hollow—it does occur to her that, sometimes, he lets her win—she forgets about her car parked down on Chestnut St., and the weather forecast she’d read that morning in her very quiet apartment over coffee, and the rolled down window on her passenger side. And tomorrow, when Sam brings her into work, sniping with her in the Corvette over the merits and demerits of caffeinated tea for no reason, she will suddenly say, _oh, damn!_ and remember.

Opened again into the morning air, her car will smell like summer, insects and dirt, the things that live after rain.

**Author's Note:**

> still feel weirdly compelled to archive everything i write over here, even though i rarely write anymore, and also, when  
> i do write, it is stuff like this: for me and me. any other young dykes out here with the media tastes of a 56-year-old straight man? please contact me at 1-800-you're-my-dad! boogie woogie woogie


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